We have recently switched our entire Bug
Tracking System to Bugzilla. Unlike the old system, Bugzilla is based on MySQL and
thus enables advanced search
functions and offers many other features such as email notification and voting. However, for access to the more advanced features and for bug and comment submission, users will need an account. Fortunately, the bug wizard will automatically create an account when used for the first time. All existing bugs from the old system have been migrated to the new system thanks to the efforts of Stephan Kulow.

I haven't used any Bugzilla setups besides Mozilla's -- but I found it far, far easier to report and respond to bugs in the old KDE system than for Mozilla. There were a zillion options, mostly incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the code.

The new KDE system seems much simpler, though, so I guess my objections were with the way Mozilla had configured the system rather than with the system itself.

Can you please add a parameter that let you choose how many top entries are shown? And something like the output table of product-target-report.cgi would be fine only for products (Bug Count by Component and Severity).

I love it :)
Thanks to Stephan and all other people who made it possible...

Two questions I have :
- Isn't the three letters limit a bit high ? How would one check for "CSS" in khtml for instance ? Wouldn't it be possible to use stop words instead, in order to allow acronym searches ?

Mozilla is competely independent from any graphical toolkits. On X11, it can use xaw, gtk, qt, as a backend. It just happens that you are using a binary compiled with gtk (which is standard on X11). It's not really a gtk app, however. It doesn't even use gtk's event loop. It does use gdk for drawing.

But, WTF is GNOME adopting such alot non-desktop libraries, even GIMP is seen as a GNOME application by lots of users, but it isn't.
I am talking about libraries like libxml2, libxst. They're really backend libraries, wich has n0thing to do with GNOME. But they're told to be GNOME libraries.
And, what about mc (Midnight Commander)? This is a console application, a Norton Commander clone. Why is this part of GNOME? GNOME just took the right to adopt mc to be its initial standard file manager. aha. nice. a console filemanager for the desktop as standard gui FM ;)

And, of course, I do not see BugZilla as a GNOME application. It has a different homepage, it has a different CVS repository, and I really can't connect it to GNOME anyway. So BugZilla is not part of GNOME.

Well, it's not that I don't like GNOME. I like it. It's good to have concurrents (to KDE, etc). But what I really don't like is its history, why it has been created, and how it adopts all the gtk based apps and other independant libaraies and console apps.

> But, WTF is GNOME adopting such alot non-desktop libraries, even GIMP is seen as a GNOME application by lots of users, but it isn't.
I am talking about libraries like libxml2, libxst. They're really backend libraries, wich has n0thing to do with GNOME. But they're told to be GNOME libraries.

Well, these libraries were developed for GNOME in the first place. Other apps saw that they were useful and use them too. KDE does this too.. for example DCOP. It's a infastructure library, not a desktop library.

> And, what about mc (Midnight Commander)? This is a console application, a Norton Commander clone. Why is this part of GNOME? GNOME just took the right to adopt mc to be its initial standard file manager. aha. nice. a console filemanager for the desktop as standard gui FM ;)

Well, Miguel De Icaza wrote mc, so I guess he has the right to do it. This is the concept of copyright. :P

> And, of course, I do not see BugZilla as a GNOME application. It has a different homepage, it has a different CVS repository, and I really can't connect it to GNOME anyway. So BugZilla is not part of GNOME.

BugZilla was developed for usage in MoZilla. Notice why BugZilla has the "Zilla" part in it yet? ;0 BugZilla is as tied to GNOME as it is to KDE.

> Well, it's not that I don't like GNOME. I like it. It's good to have concurrents (to KDE, etc). But what I really don't like is its history, why it has been created,

I agree. I don't think GNOME should have ever been created. People should have worked on Harmony instead ;) But of course, I don't think GNOME is going to die any time soon either.

> and how it adopts all the gtk based apps and other independant libaraies and console apps.

> Well, these libraries were developed for GNOME in the first place. Other apps saw that they were useful and use them too. KDE does this too.. for example DCOP. It's a infastructure library, not a desktop library.

Yes, except that libxml was initially created out of GNOME, it came to GNOME later. But anyway, as you mentioned it, I would really like to see DCOP standalone as well. Why? Because I think DCOP is more that just for the D (Desktop) and it could then be used in other applications as well (non GUI based, e.g. a daemon). I would like to use DCOP in my applications, but depending on it would even produce ugly dependencies, lets say you develop a server using DCOP, this would require to have kdelibs installed on the server as well, even if you'll never have a desktop there.

> Well, Miguel De Icaza wrote mc, so I guess he has the right to do it. This is the concept of copyright. :P

You're right ;)

> BugZilla was developed for usage in MoZilla. Notice why BugZilla has the "Zilla" part in it yet? ;0 BugZilla is as tied to GNOME as it is to KDE.

Exactly. I just kept this in mind at time of my last writing because I read this in any post before :-P

"The real enemy" isn't any specific desktop environment.
"The real enemy" is apathy, hypocrisy, and idiocy.

"The competitor" might be a closer attribute; but still,
I think we should recognize the fact that KDE and Gnome
both share very vital, even if meaningless to some,
libraries. And in that same respect, help one another
cohesively when a developer from one team or the other
finds a bug in one of these libraries, and thus takes
active steps to see that the bug is remedied properly.

Again, I ask; aren't we more likely, as developers of
open source, to help one another than we are to be enemies
to one another?

I prefer waiting for a stable KDE than using a buggy one. I agree that a minor bug can wait, but at some point, they have to be fixed, otherwise, KDE will end up having thousands of bugs. Where I work, we do not release software with critical, high and medium known bugs, otherwise, customers won't a penny for it.

Even M$ Windows has tons of bugs, they're just unknown or hidden. GNOME has bugs, everything has. The question is, how critical are they. I'm working with KDE's CVS HEAD version and it's pretty stable, so: even a desktop having such alot of bugs can be stable anyway ;)

So your company only releases bug-free code? Sounds like you're living in Never-Never Land. No software is "free from bugs". If you weigh the advantages of releasing code that isn't terribly bug free with the advantage that if you release a "buggy" version you might find MORE bugs than all your in-house testing would find in an almost infinite time. You are limited to what hardware you have in-house as opposed to a "cheap" (I mean a wide variety of machines/hardware that you haven't paid for) supply of different environments that could prove that your "bug-free" program is not what you think it is.

Anyone who says that their program is bug-free or even using your words "critical,high and medium known bugs" is either a fool or an idiot.
Warning

Which one does you or your company fall into?

Sometimes it might be advantagous to release "buggy software" in order to get a wider environment for testing purposes or even feedback about how some similar problem was solved or a work a round was discovered that the developers were confident that couldn't happen.

Read carefully before you say my colleagues and I are a bunch of fool or idiot, so I repeat again : the company do not release software with KNOWN bugs, obviously, there are some hidden bugs !!! Customers have access to our bug tracking system (TestTrack), so one can't lie about the number of KNOWN bugs.

It's a constant cycle. Developers fix bugs. Users report them. All of the bugs will never be closed unless users stop reporting them for a few months (which would be bad).

It's for all practical purposes impossible to not have open bugs with a huge user base and a public code repository. What if 20 bugs are reported on the day of the release, wait? Until when? What if during that time new bugs are introduced into CVS and reported? What then?

The release schedule is the only way around this. We try to go in phases: add features several months before the release and try to fix things in the months before the release.

Your previous statments seem to indicate that you're a programmer; start digging through the (KDE) bugs database and fixing things then! If you want to see KDE released with as few bugs as possible, then start helping!

Bugs don't get magically fixed. They take time to sort through and fix.

And just in case you're not satified, don't worry we won't don't expect you to pay a penny for it. ;-)

Wow, the way KDE has Bugzilla configured is much better than the way Mozilla has it configured. Mozilla's Bugzilla is far too cluttered and clunky to use. KDE's is much cleaner and nicer. The inclusion of QuickSearch on the front page is especially nice, Bugzilla's query form needs some major usability work. I would only suggest making the choices "Search Bugzilla" and "A much more complex search" instead of the other way around :-)

The KDE bugs team has been doing a great job. The original bug reporting system was quite good, it just didn't have the feature set that bugzilla has. Now it seems we have the best of both worlds!

The only reason Bugzilla is seen by the masses to be So Much Better than debbugs is because KDE was using an age-old version of Bugzilla (about 3 years old IIRC), and certain people refused offers of help to upgrade it, and implement systems like the PTS, that would completely match (and, IMHO, surpass) Bugzilla. All I can say that the options weren't properly considered; it's like comparing a 1991 Lancer to an SS Commodore, whereas if you used an up-to-date Evo, you'd have a chance against the Commodore ...

I think the reason Bugzilla is seen by the masses to be So Much Better than debbugs is that the masses have never heard of debbugs. I certainly hadn't until you mentioned it just now, even though apparently that's what KDE was using for some time. In contrast, now you can't visit a page at bugs.kde.org without reading the word "Bugzilla" at least three times. Maybe you need to look into ways of getting better branding for debbugs :-)

P.S. I assume you meant "KDE was using an age-old version of _debbugs_," not Bugzilla...

The biggest problem was that things didn't happen in real time with ddebugs (send mail, wait for answer, pages regenerated the day after...). With bugzilla it's all immediate, thanks to the SQL backend.
Has this changed in ddebugs?

It's your duty to vote to help identify the most annoying bugs for KDE 3.1 and most requested features which then may be implemented first for KDE 3.2 or higher. See http://makeashorterlink.com/?A574317D1 for the current highest voted bugs and wishes.

Amen, KDE is doomed. In the past I've seen to much GNOME shit moving to KDE. It's time for me switching over to GNOME completely then. Goodbye people it was really nice with you but seems that GNOME is starting to dominating everywhere. I can't belive this, it started 1 year after KDE and now KDE people is using their code all overwhere.

- Xfree CVS has a shitload of GNOME stuff now (libxml2, pkgconfig, xcoursors, fontconfig, xft2) all done by GNOME people such as Daniel Vaillant, Keith Packard, Havoc Pennington.
- KDE is using GNOME libraries now, like libxml2, libxslt, libart_lgpl and librsvg
- Now KDE uses that shitty Bugzilla which is a nightmare to use. Which requires me to create another fucking account only to post some fucking bugs. As if I don't have enough accounts already.

I'm not sure who Daniel Vaillant is, but if you mean Daniel Veillard, the author of libxml(2), he has nothing to do with libxml(2) being in xfreecvs. It was imported by Keith Packard as a dependancy to pkg/fontconfig. It's a damn good XML library. It's probably the best free/open one. It's a lot better than expat, at least.

> KDE is using GNOME libraries now, like libxml2, libxslt, libart_lgpl and librsvg

> Now KDE uses that shitty Bugzilla which is a nightmare to use.

Oh god. Once again, Bugzilla has nothing to do with GNOME! GNOME uses it. That's all. KDE is in the same position with Bugzilla as GNOME is. GNOME used debbugs until several years ago (late 2000 I beleive) like KDE did until very recently.

Bugzilla is tied to Mozilla, not anything else. Again, Bugzilla is one of the best free/open bug reporting/collecting packages available. It's definatly the most customizable. I agree that it has usablility problems in the default configurations, but it is very configurable. Usability is as good as the interfaces to bugzilla made.

> KDE is using GNOME libraries now, like libxml2, libxslt, libart_lgpl and librsvg

Because perhaps it saves in programming time? The libraries you mentioned are not tied architecturally in any way to GNOME, and they are all great libraries. Why shouldn't KDE use them?

I think you have a bad case of the "Not Invented Here" (NIH) Syndrome.